Friday, August 16, 2013

Revival nerf!

At this stage it looks like Revival will be 30% less ridiculous in patch 5.4. I'm not saying it was poor design to have up to a third of your total healing numbers over an eight minute boss fight to come from three GCDs... but it's probably still worse design than only a quarter of your total healing numbers coming from three GCDs.

Before this week I had only an abstract interest in that conversation about healing cooldowns being too important, but now I fully understand the frustration. Unless you're doing content which is on the high end of your abilities as a player, these tools are superfluous and are used either as cheap ways to boost healing numbers, or to remove the need to heal efficiently.

Maybe I just need to be doing harder content.

I read about the tank Vengeance change-- they are nerfing the raw amount and removing the incentive for tanks to take unnecessary damage to increase their damage output, ie by "standing in the fire". I can understand the overall nerf-- we can't let our precious damage roles feel like they're subpar to tanks in the one area they're supposed to specialise in. The standing in fire thing I can understand too; we don't want to reward people for playing badly. But they have also gone out of their way to "target cap" Vengeance gained tanking large groups of mobs. Honestly, that feels like being punished for doing something awesome, not to mention emergent by definition (if they meant to do it why are they "fixing" it).

How about a similar change for healers where healing done by the major cooldowns doesn't count towards healing meters? Are those things not equivalent? It's giving me an incentive to play badly (use CD when it will provide the most healing, instead of to deal with encounter mechanics or stop a death) to increase my healing output.

Have you tried the Mistweaver Monk class yet? The class has a pretty revolutionary healing style for WoW, with all kind of location-specific healing, between statues, Spinning Crane Kick (used similarly to the original incarnation of Holy Radiance), Chi Torpedo, Chi Wave and Healing Spheres-- a floor-targeted smart heal. Spheres are ridiculously strong and not too mana inefficient. I get the feeling that the only reason they have stayed so strong is because few people understand how to use them effectively so it has yet to develop a reputation for being OP. For example, the most efficient way for a Monk to go from zero to tank saving is to drop Spheres on the tank's physical location.

2 comments:

Yeah, Revival was too good to the point of being broken in the live game (all that healing AND a mass dispel?!), it had to be bounced back significantly. If it's only by 30% I'm surprised by that, 70% wouldn't have seemed out of whack. I've been in fights in LFR (I've only healed LFR so it's my only comparison available) where I've been top healer late in a fight by a comfortable amount, just to have a Monk pop up and smoke me in the last 30 seconds. First time it happened I asked the monk about it afterward, he just said "Revival". Now I know to expect it.

I tried Mistweaver for a bit, ran a few LFRs, ran a few heroics, just couldn't get a feel for it. I can't really do the hybrid dps/healing thing since I don't use mouseover macros, I can only heal with targets so having to switch to and from hostile mobs is just too much of a pain in the ass. I don't mind combination dps/healing buttons (SCK) but ultimately it just didn't feel good. I tried doing the stand-back-and-heal thing but it felt even less immediate than druid healing and I had trouble wrapping my head (&/or reflexes) around the interaction between Soothing Mist and the various other spells you can cast WHILE CHANNELING (that was more than a bit of a mind frak when I realized that was possible and not really in a good way). Overall I just found it to be weak (for me, not in general) and disconcerting (probably not JUST for me, but definitely for me). I've gone back to WW/BM and will likely stay that way permanently.

Oddly, I don't have the same issue with Atonement, I can switch from Atonement on a boss to normal healing on party members without much issue. I can't explain why there's a difference, it feels like it should be similar.

Unrelated trivia - those Healing Spheres won't heal the gryphons with the "rescue the gryphons" (probably not its actual name) quest out in Twilight Highlands, discovered that last night on my leveling WW monk. Annoying, since that's the only decent non-self-heal that non-MW monks have. 5 Chi Waves weren't enough so I gave up and moved on. If Healing Sphere was an actual heal it would have worked. :)

As for Vengeance, last I heard it isn't a cap, just diminishing returns... you'll do more dps with 20 mobs on you than 10 so you can keep pulling big, you'll just do 30% (making that up) more dps rather than 100% more. It'll still be more. DPS generally have to deal with caps/DR on AoE dps (Chain Lightning can only hit 5 mobs no matter how many are in the pack) so it only makes sense to rein in tanks as well.

It's odd to hear someone say that Mistweaver feels weak and disconcerting, because I found it to be extremely powerful and intuitive. Healing efficiently does require some thought and planning (as it should), but regular single target healing is point and shoot.

The most efficient raid healing rotation I've found is to Renewing Mists on CD and Fistweave the rest of the time unless someone is in danger of dying or or there is major raid damage. For low damage phases, stop at five stacks of Vital Mists and just autoattack for some free smart healing while you regen mana. Tea on CD!

I did some napkin math last night and a Jab, Tiger Palm rotation only costs about 4k mana per Jab when you factor in the Mana Tea you'll get back later. Spending more GCDs on cheap abilities like Chi Wave and Expel Harm (or support abilities-- is the boss disarmable?) will increase your efficiency even more.

I do use a heavily modified interface though, with Clique mouseover macros for my important healing buttons. But actually Enveloping Mist gets all shirty if you don't target the person you're channeling Soothing on so I've resorted to macroing in a /cleartarget [target=help] immediately following the cast, just to solve the problem of mouseover not directly targetting people. >_>

(As an aside, I actually didn't mean to post this draft. I'm glad it didn't end up sound too incoherent, and a bit surprised not to find any paragraphs that end mid-sentence.)